Run Catch Kiss

by Amy Sohn

  “Gwyneth Paltrow?”

  “Yeah. Gwyneth Paltrow. She doesn’t go around talking about sex, because she’s so beautiful, she doesn’t have to stoop low to get attention from men.”

  “Are you asking if I’m ugly?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Ariel is a very attractive young woman,” said Norman.

  “Well, that’s surprising,” said Edna, “because in my experience, those who talk about it never do it. If you were beautiful as Brad Pitt’s ex, you wouldn’t feel the need to talk trash. It’s disgusting to hear a young woman with such a filthy mouth.”

  “Oh, Edna,” I said, “if you’re saying women should just shut up and look good, you’re living in the Stone Age. Gwyneth Paltrow is not exactly a shining role model. I think the public fascination with her is just another sign of our increasing tendency to worship mediocrity and laud peroxided women who build entire careers out of looking bored.”

  (I didn’t really say that. What I actually said was, “I hate Gwyneth Paltrow! I’m sick of hearing about her! I hate her!” But my thoughts were eloquent, I swear.)

  “Well, I think you’re a tramp,” said Edna. “And I think someone should wash your mouth out with soap!”

  “Thanks for calling, Edna,” said Norman. “Let’s go to Ariel in New Brunswick. Now, Ariel, you say your boyfriend is abusive to you?”

  “Yeah.” It was a guy’s voice. Not just a guy’s voice, but a guy who was making no attempt whatsoever to disguise his gender. I’d met guys named Ariel before—it’s a pretty common Hebrew name—but I didn’t know if this was a gay guy Ariel or a trickster.

  “Are you a woman, Ariel?” asked Norman.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Are you aware that you sound just like a man?”

  “I hear that all the time,” he said. “Anyway, I have this boyfriend, he’s really mean to me, verbally and mentally; he abuses me. He drives me crazy sometimes, he just—” Another guy’s voice came on in the background. “Get off the phone, you no-good whore! I’ll kick your ass!! Bitch!”

  Norman disconnected them quickly, gesturing to the engineer to make sure the swear words got dumped in time. I couldn’t help but feel a tad unsettled. Here was a man pretending to be a girl named Ariel who went out with jerky men. I felt replaced somehow. I wanted to say something that would give us the last laugh on them, something cunning, witty, and in sum.

  “See, Norman?” I said. “You’re beginning to look like a more and more attractive date—now that I’m reminded of what the alternatives are. Those two represent what my generation has to offer, Norman. Those invective-spewing fools.”

  “That’s a backhanded compliment if I ever heard one.”

  “I don’t mean it in a backhanded way. I really like you. So, what do you say? Should we go out?”

  “I don’t know. What if I fell in love with you? Then I’d wind up getting hurt. You said yourself you don’t believe in monogamy.”

  “At least you’d get a good shtup out of it.”

  “Good point.”

  “You could show me the town and I could show you my tits.”

  He gestured to the engineer, who was fiddling frantically with some buttons, and said, “Uh oh, Ariel, we’re going to have to dump that.”

  “Oops, can I not say ‘tit’ on the air?” He waved to the engineer again. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I’m like Madonna on David Letterman.”

  “That’s OK. Just don’t do it again. Tom from East Orange, you’re on the air.”

  “I got one question. If there was a small town, right? Say there was a small town, and the fate of the town depended on the outcome of a football game. If the entire fate of everybody’s future depended on the town winning this game, who would play—men, or women?”

  There was a pause. Norman and I looked at each other.

  “What are you getting at, Tom?” asked Norman.

  “I’m saying women are weaklings. Men are stronger than women. I am sick of hearing women like this Ariel say women and men are the same.”

  I wanted to set this guy straight, tell him what a raging idiot he must have been to call a radio station just to say women are weak. Tell him that, judging by the desperation in his voice, it sounded like he probably hadn’t gotten laid in a long, long time.

  I opened my mouth to start in on him but the closing music was coming on and he had already hung up. “That’s all the time we have left,” said Norman. “Thank you, Ariel Steiner. Tune in tomorrow night when our guest will be East Village witch Darcy Kaplowitz.”

  •

  On the cab ride home from the radio station, I started to feel totally schizoid. I didn’t know who I was anymore—me, or Ariel Steiner. Ariel Steiner was the girl on the show. She was the cool and outrageous sexpot of lower Manhattan, even though I lived in Brooklyn. She wasn’t looking for any relationship deeper than her own vagina. She sought quick dick and nothing more, didn’t speak to her lays in the morning, and fucked to come, even though I couldn’t. Half of me despised her and the other half wanted to be her.

  When I got into the apartment, the light on my answering machine was steady, unblinking. No Sara, no boys. I didn’t feel like a cool and outrageous sexpot without any messages on my machine. I took off my coat and sat on the couch in the dark. Then I went to the phone and called Charlton.

  “Hey, Ariel,” he said. “I loved that column you wrote about me. It made me, like, relive the whole experience.”

  “I’m glad you liked it. Do you want to get together again?”

  “Yeah. What are you doing tomorrow night?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Can you meet me on the steps of Port Authority at five o’clock?”

  I had a feeling he wasn’t going to take me to The Lion King, “Why do you want to meet there?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “Why?”

  “If I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise. But I’ll give you a hint: you might get some good material.”

  “Can’t I just come to your place?”

  “No. If you don’t want to meet me on Forty-second Street, that’s OK. But I’m not gonna meet you at my house.”

  And even though I knew exactly what he had in mind, I didn’t refuse him, because I wanted him to want me, even in the most degrading way. Besides, he was right about the material. I had to come up with a column by tomorrow—and it would be way too boring to write about the radio show. This was all in the interest of research. I was Ariel Steiner, sex journalist. Ariel Steiner sought out adventure at all costs. She rubbed her face in the grimiest, most low-down centers of debauchery and quick pleasure in the city, then came up smiling. She wasn’t scared of sin; sin was her whole MO.

  •

  He was eating a hot dog when I got there, and he had a slightly sinister smile on his face. “Where we going?” I asked.

  He pointed across the street to a black-and-yellow sign: SHOW WORLD CINEMAS, MOVIES 25 CENTS.

  We crossed the street and went in. Through the door was a combination newsstand/sex shop, with dirty magazines laid out on a counter and sex toys hanging on the walls. There were two Pakistani men behind the magazine counter. I glanced at them nervously, expecting them to raise their eyebrows at me, but they didn’t even look up.

  Charlton thumbed through some magazines while I stared up at the vibrators and dildos. I owned a vibrator, but it was this tiny sweet pink thing called Mini Pearl that I’d ordered from a mail-order company in San Francisco. These cocks were terrifying. I walked over to Charlton. He was looking at a magazine open to a photo of a woman handcuffed to a bed, lying on her stomach, getting fucked by a huge bulbous, veiny cock.

  “What do you think of that?” he said.

  “I think we should go in,” I said.

  He led me to a tall counter with a fat, dark-skinned black man sitting behind it. Charlton gave him some money and bought some tokens. We went through a turnstile and came to a staircase with a sign next to it that re
ad, LIVE GIRLS UPSTAIRS. MOVIES DOWNSTAIRS.

  Charlton gestured to the sign and pointed up with a hopeful look. I shook my head no. There was a limit as to how far I would go in the pursuit of good fodder. I didn’t want to see real women, wonder if they had kids, what their lives were like, how they’d gotten into this. Movies were safer, more pretend.

  To the right of the staircase was a hallway with rows of booths on either side. We walked down the aisle in search of an empty room. In between the doors there were signs reading, One Person Per Booth.

  “How are we going to get around that?” I said.

  “Just sneak in behind me,” he said. An attendant walked by, wheeling a bucket and mop. When he was safely out of sight, Charlton went in one of the doors and I slipped in after him.

  The room was tiny, maybe four feet by four feet. It smelled of disinfectant. The walls were Formica red, and to the right of the door there was a small ledge to sit on. The only noises I could hear were the distant moans coming from the movies in the other booths. Charlton locked the door and sat on the jerk-off ledge, I leaned against the door, and we looked at the screen. A message flashed, PUT IN A TOKEN on a green background, while upbeat electronic music played. To the right of the screen were a token slot and buttons numbered one through four.

  He put a token in the slot and four boxes appeared on the screen, showing the different movies you could choose from: Asian chick getting fucked by chubby white guy doggie style; tennis court with two pairs of doubles going at it; man walking in on his wife masturbating in the bathroom; and black woman on a couch getting eaten by a black guy with a gold marijuana-leaf ring on one of his fingers.

  “Which one do you want to watch?” whispered Charlton.

  “I don’t care,” I whispered back.

  He pressed the button for the one with the Asian chick. The small box turned full-screen. It looked kind of scary large. The guy’s ass was facing the camera, and in the background was the girl’s head, angled sideways so we could see it. She kept saying “Yes” and “More,” but her face was contorted with something that looked closer to pain than pleasure, and the guy’s butt was so pale and ugly that I didn’t exactly envy her.

  Charlton pressed a new number and the image switched to a white woman with a white band in her hair sucking the cock of a bearded Latin guy. Her mascara was runny from having the dick near her face. Charlton pressed another one and the movie changed to an Asian girl on a bed, eating a white girl who had shaved pubic hair.

  “You wanna sit on my lap?” asked Charlton. I went over and straddled him, so my back was to the screen. “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t want to watch.”

  He shrugged, leaned toward me, and kissed me, and then he lifted up my shirt and bra and squeezed my breast. I rubbed myself against him, closed my eyes, and tried to pretend we were anywhere else in the world but Show World. Every few minutes the token would expire, the Ms. Pac-Man music would come on, and he’d have to lean over to put another token in the machine. The periodic interruptions did not exactly make for a sexy mood.

  After a while I opened my eyes. I noticed that his were closed. “Why’d you take me here if you’re not watching the movie?” I asked.

  “It’s the sounds that turn me on.”

  “The sounds? But they’re so fake.”

  “I know,” he said, grinning. “That’s exactly why they turn me on.”

  He kissed me some more and I started to get hot. I could feel him get harder. He pulled me tightly to him. Then he reached into his pocket, took out a condom, and gave me a look. I stared down at the square of plastic and I thought, Other girls would be scared to do this, but not Ariel Steiner. Ariel Steiner can fuck in a porno booth and come out feeling liberated, not gross. I wanted to be able to do it. I wanted not to be afraid.

  We both stood up and I pulled down my jeans and underwear, but only to below my butt. We switched places and I sat on the ledge. I was scared there might be some leftover come on it from the last guy that would get inside me and kill me, so I slid forward and angled my body up as high as I could.

  Charlton pulled down his jeans and boxers, rolled on the condom, leaned over me, shoved it in, and began to pump away, one hand bracing himself against the wall, the other playing with my breast. Soon the token expired and the music came on again. I listened to the blips and bells and stared up at Charlton’s sweaty face, and I felt like I was fourteen again, lying there on the beach, waiting for the moan, because that was how I’d know it was finally over.

  I didn’t want to be this miserable. I wanted to love it. I was fucking without caring, just like a guy. Wasn’t this the sex columnist’s dream?

  Suddenly there was a knock on the door. A West Indian-accented man’s voice said, “You gotta put in another token.”

  “Just a second!” yelled Charlton, staying inside me and searching his pockets for another token. I got this vision of the attendant walking in on us, finding me there on the ledge, my shirt half up, my bra shoved above my breasts, my pants halfway down my legs, Charlton poised above me. The attendant would yell out for the other pervs to come look, and they would all open their red doors and gather in the doorway to stare. Charlton would keep on thrusting, delighted to put on a show, as the men crowded into the booth, their tongues lolling out of their mouths, their eyes bloodshot from their own spunk. I’d jump up, plow through them, and run off toward Port Authority, pulling on my clothes, humiliated and totally alone.

  I couldn’t let that nightmare come alive. I yanked Charlton out, stood up, buttoned my jeans, pulled down my shirt, and ran down the hallway. But when I came to what I thought would be the street, I just saw the turnstile where we entered. I tried to go through it but it wouldn’t turn. The magazine men and token taker looked at me. I did an about-face and ran back down the way I came. A mustachioed guy in a business suit was about to go into a booth and he gave me this half-quizzical, half-bemused look. I rushed past him and finally came to a door that exited onto Eighth Avenue. I walked a few paces down the street, breathing in deeply, and for once in my life that New York City smell of exhaust, hot dog, and cigarette made me relieved and not disgusted.

  I noticed there was a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream store across the street. I thought about the strangeness of that, of the new Times Square and the old Times Square peering at each other from across a divide, like a showdown, to see who would perish first.

  Charlton emerged from the door. “You wanna go to another theater?”

  “No,” I said. “I think I’ve had enough.” I walked down the street and into the train.

  •

  At the Broadway-Nassau Street stop, my father got on. I wanted to bolt into another car but there wasn’t any time. He saw me through the window before the doors even opened.

  “Look who it is,” he said. I scooted over and he sat down next to me. Could he tell where I’d been by the look on my face? What did I smell like? Spermicide? Lysol? Sex?

  “Where are you coming from?” he asked.

  “Uh . . . a friend’s house. In Hell’s Kitchen. What about you?”

  “The office. We drove back from Philly this morning so I could get some work done today. How was the radio show?”

  “It was fun. A lot of freaks called in.” He raised his eyebrows and nodded like he wanted to hear more, but I couldn’t tell him much else without saying I’d pretended to be an early comer and a bisexual just to impress the callers, so I didn’t elaborate. He stared at me for a moment, waiting for me to continue, and then he took out a New Yorker from his briefcase and started to read it.

  He was my own father and we couldn’t sustain a conversation for more than a few minutes. It didn’t used to be like that. When I was a kid, he was my best friend. Every spring weekend we would ride our bikes across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Lower East Side and run errands for my mom. We’d buy pistachios and clothes and fish, and then we would stop at the Chinatown branch of the New York Public Library and he would check out my
stery books for himself and Judy Blume books for me. When I got older, he would take me to art house cinemas, like Theatre 80 and the Quad, to see Hercule Poirot movies and Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper, and on the bike ride home we would talk about the movies, and I would feel brilliant and funny and loved.

  When I busted my chin open, I was with him. It was the summer between fifth and sixth grades, and he, my mom, Zach, and I were renting a house in Vermont for a few weeks. One afternoon he and I decided to go for a bike ride while my mom and Zach went to a beach. My mom drove us to the rental place and then we waved good-bye to her and rode off together on a perfectly paved black path. After a few miles, we came to a steep downhill. I coasted way ahead of him, enjoying the speed and the breeze. I heard the wind singing through my helmet and felt my T-shirt rippling against my chest, and I felt strong and free and totally invincible. Halfway down, the bike started going too fast, and I began to spin out of control. “I’m going too fast!” I shouted, and in the distance I heard him calling, “Touch your brakes!”

  But my brakes had been testy all morning—whenever I used them, the bike would wobble—and I was convinced that at this speed, braking would make me spin out of control. I held on and hoped for the best, but I catapulted forward over the handlebars, slammed down onto the blacktop next to the bike, and rolled down the hill, feeling my elbows and knees break open, positive that when I stopped moving I’d be dead.

  When I finally came to a halt, I heard him pedaling up behind me and his bike clattering to the pavement. He rushed up beside me. I stood up slowly and we inspected my scrapes. I had huge strawberries on my elbows and knees, but that seemed to be the worst of it until he said, “Your chin’s bleeding pretty badly.”

  “Do you think I’ll need an operation?”

  “I hope not,” he said, then lifted the bottom of his polo shirt to his mouth, bit into it, tore off a strip, and tied it under my chin and around my head.

  I hated seeing him with that torn shirt. It made me feel like we were victims of a tragedy, and I didn’t want to feel that way. He helped me pick up my bike and we began walking down the road to find some help. He said he’d noticed a car pass us with a family in it, about ten minutes ago, and he thought maybe their house was nearby. We wheeled our bikes in silence for a while and then I started to weep. I hated myself for ruining the afternoon, for making him worry, for being stupid enough to fall. “I’m sorry for not touching the brakes,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.”